I had a glimpse this morning of the thin line between insanity and genius. I lay in bad, as sometimes happens, both asleep and awake, yet not quite either. It was what I can only describe as a state of dementia, with my mind driving ahead towards some unkown, unchangeable destination. This particular morning I owed to Mozart and the intracacies of musical genius. It began as a simple line, a melody caught from the mess of baroque tunes somewhere filtered through my head. I have struggled for some time to achieve melodies -- essences of song -- and not merely technical pleasantries of fourths and thirds.

So I tried, as rarely happens, to take control, to strike with passion this insane moment. I swelled a background of orchestral harmonies, bursting in on a single refined note, with the soloists' melody emerging soon again into the spotlight. I had never before been able to hear in my head a full orchestra playing impromptu my imaginations; and I glimpsed for a moment a fragment of how Mozart must have lived within his head as he wrote.

With strange consciousness, I struggled to hold on to this rare moment, to compose as long as I could, to memorize the melody for when I fully awoke. And when I did, when the dream-state ended, I grabbed my violin to give form to my thought. But the melody vibrated indistinctly: my skills not sufficient, my pitch not accurate. The more I attempted to recreate the melody, the more the real one in my mind faded away. First went the harmony, leaving the naked solo unglorified, yet still promising in its beauty. But as the now-harsh sounds of my violin intruded more, the vision receded until I was merely back in my apartment, in my pajamas, with a violin and an unfulfilled desire.

As I sit and write this now, such music has left me. I can hardly relate one of Mozart's melodies, much less remember my own. Perhaps one day I can transcribe pitch to notes; it takes concentration and, of course, practice. But a glimpse of possible genius is as tantalizing as it is motivating.  ¶ 10:35 PM

  On Why Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof

Among a skeptic's tools of debate is the notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, also known as Sagan's Balance. The majority of this tool's use has been aimed towards paranormal and fringe areas of science, and many skeptics' attempts to explain its use have paralleled this direction. (For example, see this article in Quackwatch, and also see the November/December issue of the Skeptical Inquirer.) However, the Balance is by no means reserved for the paranormal. Its use as a skeptic's tool has arisen very mundanely from the gradual evolution of modern science. A cursory overview of classic science sees the Balance embedded just as much in fantastic claims as in more orthodox -- but not less extraordinary -- claims.

Let us say, for instance, that two separate claims hit the headlines of the New York Times. In one, a paranormalist has finally invented the elusive free-energy machine. (Such a story was actually reported in Reuters this week, see here.) In the other headline, a respected Harvard biologist has discovered the final, single pill that will cure AIDS. In the former story, the subject is one far outside the traditional realm of physics and a direct contradiction of Newton's Second Law. In the latter, the subject is comfortably within the bounds of modern laboratory research. If skeptics judge the free-energy story harshly with Sagan's Balance, are they being unfair and biased against fringe science? No, because any scientist or even non-scientist would question the AIDS claim with just the same argument.

Sagan's Balance, then, is firmly rooted in practicality, not in a priori assumptions and biases. Essentially, it asks the question: "how large an impact would the claim have on society?" Surely, if we all had access to free energy, the results would be both revolutionary for progress and catastrophic for current business (if only temporarily so). The same must also be true of the cure for AIDS. Unnumbered AIDS organizations would close, sex may once again become '60s-style free, and thousands of researchers would need new jobs. On the other hand, more ordinary claims such as "crows eat worms" do not have a large impact on society, and thus are held to less high standards of evidential quality.

If we are to embrace and prepare for the repercussions of extraordinary ideas, we must know them in detail. Extraordinary evidence paces us, allowing our scientific paradigms to shift slowly into the next era; no shifts so far have been overnight revolutions. Sagan's Balance was not invented as a response to paranormal and fringe science: it has existed all along throughout classic science, and that is why we use it for all extraordinary claims.  ¶ 10:05 PM

  I'm trying hard to get through Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach, which clocks in at 740+ pages. In about one month of actual reading, I've only managed to get through 130 pages, much of it during my off-hours at work. Not only is the book quite dense, but the prospect of sitting down and navigating all of its logical twists on a school night is always daunting; grueling sessions in systems of formal logic hardly seems a good way to relax.

It's a strange irony, really. I know that if I just spend my time reading that book instead of watching TV or playing games, I'll feel exponentially better about myself when I get ready for bed. To have the rare opportunity to know that happiness is a mere half-hours' reading away, and yet to be of such a lazy nature not to take that small leap from emptiness to fulfillment -- it really is quite frustrating to face myself.

I suppose there's a lesson in self-discipline here, but the lure of doing nothing productive is so hard to refuse. It's as though my scales are uncalibrated, and the weight of transient pleasure is vastly disproportionate to the weight of more permanent satisfaction. I know, of course, that the latter should be my priority. But there are so many nights when the inevitability of choosing fleeting pleasure bears down on me like a train on a fear-frozen deer: I see the danger and know its outcome, but it all feels quite helpless. I only hope that maturity will come with age.  ¶ 1:32 AM

  Physics Paradox

Here's a little paradox that me and my sister Roberta thought up last summer, though I'm fairly certain many people have come up with it in the past. It's pretty basic, and likely has already been solved.

Imagine you have an infinitely thin and infinitely light disc (made out of a new ultra-light material) in the vacuum of space. You stand (in a spacesuit, one hopes) at the center, where the disc has an axis of rotation. You mark a little spot a short distance (say, one millimeter) away from the center of the disc, and make another mark on the outer edge. If you give the disc a small twist so that the inner spot moves one millimeter, the outer spot must move through a longer distance in the same amount of time. In other words, the outer spot has to move faster than the inner spot for it to keep up the same rate of revolutions per second.

Now stretch the disc out an enormous distance, so that the outer mark is many trillions of miles away. Since the disc is both infinitely thin and infinitely light, this huge disc can still be spun. Now a millimeter's twist of the inner mark sends the outer mark spinning at an enormous velocity. As we keep stretching the disc, at some radius we will reach a point where the outer mark moves at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, thus contradicting one of the most basic theorums of physics.

There are many potential reasons why such a disc would not spin, even if such a material were discovered and such a disc could be built. Perhaps at its size, even the lightest of materials would add up to such a massive amount that there would be no force large enough to send the disc spinning. It may even collapse upon itself at some critical mass. Of course, one could create a smaller disc and simply spin it faster. But the force required to spin it would increase as the required speed increased. Again, such a force may not exist.

Even if this paradox is only a trivial bit of fun, it shows how playing around with some simple ideas can stimulate imagination and thinking. I'm sure if I gave it to a professional physicist, he or she would laugh and write a few equations showing why it can't be done. But for a non-physicist like myself, such things are fascinating.  ¶ 1:29 PM

  Wow, it's been a month since my last post. Work is always intruding and using up my thinking... I'll have one sometime soon.  ¶ 5:36 PM